“Which one went on? Which side?”
Lloyd said the left-side light came on, the right side was broken, and then went on to offer a startling spate of additional details about the car—oversize shocks, high suspension, wide tires, chrome wheel covers—“and he had pinstripes on each side, and they were about one inch apart and they were black, and he had something written like an advertisement thing in the right-hand corner.”
“The front?”
“The back of the windshield. And it looked like it was on the outside or inside, I couldn’t really tell, and then his mufflers sounded really loud, and I noticed they sounded like glasspack mufflers, and he had square coming out, you know the muffler which at the end was a square, and I told my wife, Helen, I said, ‘Ain’t that a nice car, a souped-up car?’ and she said, ‘uh,’ she wasn’t paying that much attention to it. She was really tired from walking around so much and looking for a job, so she didn’t pay much attention. I don’t know if she saw the car or not. And we were pulling out, and he was right in front of us, and we were at the light and we stopped, and the light turned green, and I wasn’t really looking at the car when the light turned green, when he took off, that’s what got me to look again, because I was listening to the muffler and talking to her, and then he went west. And we went toward Langley Park, and that was the last time I had seen him since.”
“Why didn’t you come forward with this information when you first heard about it?”
“Because I wasn’t really positive and sure if it was the same guy and the same two girls at the time, and that’s why I was up in Wheaton Plaza today, looking at the picture and listening around to see if it was the same two girls and the same guy, and then I saw a captain, he was a security guard, and he remembered me there last Tuesday in a brown fur jacket.”
“You were wearing a brown fur jacket?”
“Yeah, I was wearing a brown fur jacket, and he talked to me again today. I mean, he didn’t talk to me last week, but he talked to me, and I told him about what I saw. That’s when he contacted you all. That’s when you got ahold of me.”
Lloyd said he might be able to identify the girls and the man if he saw them again. He could describe what the weather was like that earlier afternoon: “A little windy, but it was nice.” He said the Camaro had white Maryland tags.
“Okay, Lloyd, are you telling me, the police department, all this of your own free will?”
“Yes, I am.”
“No one has asked you?”
“No. I came forward of my own free will because I have been worried about the girls, even though I don’t know them, but I just can’t stand to see anybody hurt, two little girls, or anybody hurt.”
Hargrove and Thilia warned him that giving a false statement to the police was a criminal offense.
“Now, with that in mind, are you willing to say everything you told us is correct?” asked one of the officers.
“Yes, I am. I am telling you the truth. I can’t afford to lie because I have a baby on the way and a wife to take care of, and I can’t afford to lie about anything.”
“Are you nervous right now?”
“I am a little nervous talking to the tape recorder, yes.”
In a final flourish, Lloyd added that the man he saw leaving with the girls “walked with a little limp.”
Lloyd was then given a lie detector test, which he flunked. Flustered, he admitted that he’d made up everything about the car and about seeing the tape recorder man with the girls outside the mall. He had told them nothing that anyone listening to news reports wouldn’t know, gussied up with a peculiar flurry of made-up particulars. Lloyd thought for sure he’d be arrested then, but instead the detectives dismissed him, no doubt annoyed.
The officers missed something about Lloyd Welch that day, something big. Days earlier, Danette Shea, a girl slightly older than Sheila Lyon, who had seen Sheila at the mall that day, had described a man who had been following and staring at Danette and her friends. He had been so obnoxious that one of the girls had taunted him: “Why don’t you take a picture? It’ll last longer.” Shea had described the man as eighteen or nineteen years old, five eleven to six foot, dark brown hair in a shag, medium mustache. A police artist had even produced a sketch, which was in the growing file. It looked a lot like Lloyd.
Before leaving, Lloyd was given a lecture about lying to the police. He was enormously relieved. The Montgomery County police were swimming in useless tips just then. Given the urgency of the situation, the kid wasn’t just a nuisance, he was a serious waste of time. They had no doubt sized him up as a local knucklehead, obviously high, trying to insinuate himself into the story, play the hero, and collect a reward—WMAL, the radio station that employed John Lyon, had just upped its offering to $14,000, and the Wheaton Plaza Merchants’ Association had put up $5,000 more. Lloyd seemed stupid, not suspicious. How much sense would it make, after all, for someone involved with a kidnapping to draw attention to himself by claiming to be a witness and telling an elaborate lie? The six-page typed transcript of the interview went into a ring binder with all the other stray bits. A one-page report was written up. At the top, Hargrove wrote, “LIED.”
After that, the department didn’t give Lloyd Welch a second thought.
Not for thirty-eight years.
2
Finding Lloyd
John and Mary Lyon, 1975
ONE SHOT
One shot was all they were likely to get with Lloyd Welch. So the Montgomery County Police Department’s Lyon squad had gamed the meeting for months, all through the summer and fall of 2013. They had even driven down to Quantico, Virginia, to consult with FBI behavioral analysts, who drew up impressive charts and summoned comparative data to pronounce Lloyd a classic hard case. The analysts predicted he would clam up as soon as he learned what the squad wanted to ask him about.
At that point all they knew about Lloyd Lee Welch came from files. His criminal record sketched a rough time line before and after he had walked into Wheaton Plaza in 1975 with his bogus story—or so it had been considered then; now the authorities were less certain.
Lloyd’s record traced a heroic trail of malfeasance. In Maryland: larceny (1977), burglary (1981), assault and battery (1982). In Florida: burglary in Orlando (1977), burglary in Miami (1980). In Iowa: robbery in Sioux City (1987). Then he’d moved to South Carolina: public drunkenness and then grand larceny in Myrtle Beach (1988), burglary in Horry County (1989), sexual assault on a ten-year-old girl in Lockhart (1992), drunk driving in Clover (1992). Then on to Virginia: sexual assault on a minor in Manassas (1996), simple assault in Manassas (1997). He’d finally landed hard in Delaware: sexual assault of a ten-year-old girl in New Castle (1997). After that the list ended. This was typical. Waning hormones or better judgment often overtook even the slowest learners by their mid-thirties, after which they avoided trouble. Either that or they got killed or locked up. In Welch’s case it was the latter. He was deep into a thirty-three-year sentence for the Delaware charge, housed at the James T. Vaughn Correctional Center in Smyrna.
All that interested the squad, however, was the story he’d told in 1975. Here was a potential eyewitness, albeit a sticky one, to the kidnapping of Sheila and Kate Lyon. He had failed every part of that old polygraph except his claim to have been in Wheaton Plaza at the same time the girls had disappeared, which was the part that most interested the detectives. If he had seen the girls with their abductor, he might be able to corroborate, all these years later, evidence against the squad’s prime suspect, a notorious pedophile and murderer named Ray Mileski.